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Saturday, January 7, 2012

Pepsi Says Mountain Dew Can Dissolve Dead Mice

In a bizarre legal move, Pepsi Co. is claiming that Mountain Dew is capable of dissolving dead mice. A man in Madison County, Ill. "claims that after opening and beginning to drink soda he purchased from a vending machine at work, he tasted something foul. He claims he spat out the soda to reveal a dead mouse." I'm not sure how you can drink such a large gulp of soda that a mouse carcass would escape notice at first, but that's beside the point. In November 2009, Ronald Ball filed a suit against Pepsi Co. for over $50,000 in damages, and the case is going to court next week.

In an affidavit, Pepsi's expert witness testified that Ball's claim is false, writing that the mouse would have turned into a "a jelly-like substance" by the time he opened his can of pop 74 days after its bottling:

By 30 days of exposure to the fluid, all of the mouse's structures will have disintegrated to the point the structures (excepting possibly a portion of the tail) will not be recognizable and, therefore, the animal itself will not be recognizable. Instead, after 30 days in the fluid, the mouse will have been transformed into a "jelly-like" substance.

Even if Pepsi wins the case, I'm not sure that you can actually count this as a win overall. A can of mouse-dissolving acid to go with your fries, anyone?